"The Territorial Rights of Animals: Zoopolis and Beyond"
S2
Wild animal populations are collapsing. By and large, we are destroying them. According
to the most recent Living Planet Report, by 2020 wild animal populations will have dropped by
67% just since 1970.1 And 1970 was no great shakes. By contrast, in that time, human population
will have more than doubled from 3.7 billion to almost 8. This catastrophic loss of biodiversity
barely registers in our economics or politics because living wild animals have neither political
voice nor economic value. “Ecosystem services” and “natural capital” are counted for zero in
mainstream Economics, which is to say that mainstream Economics is built on the delusion of
Earth’s infinitude.
Philosophical liberalism is also built on denying this disecology. One aspect of
liberalism’s “Earth question” is the sharp divide between humans and everything else, including
all other living things, which are treated as part of the natural background over and against which
humans can assert and negotiate normative and political claims, but which are not accorded any
political status or rights in themselves. Consequently, for liberals, humans are as gods on Earth;
liberal capitalism unleashes humans’ potential to amass wealth and spread it widely. Liberals
tend to view more growth, better distributed, as the solution to global poverty. Liberal arguments
on all fronts – for open immigration, for a global resource dividend, for health justice, basic
income, what have you – virtually all presuppose that the extractionist growth economy can and
will continue apace and grow in perpetuity. But as Tim Hayward asks, S3
how is that growth in fact going to be maintained, let alone something saved [for future
generations], when the consequences of economic growth to date are already—as is now,
World Wildlife Fund, Living Planet Report 2016: Risk and Resilience in a New Era. Gland, Switzerland: WWF
International, 2016: 12.
1
1
belatedly, recognized—threatening the very biophysical basis of human life on this
planet?2
Faced with the challenge of spreading prosperity, liberalism robs from the future to pay the
presently impoverished without sacrificing any of the wealth of the presently affluent. Liberalism
licenses and indeed celebrates, depends on, what amounts to murder-suicide on a planetary scale.
S4
Liberal theories of territory are no exception to this pattern. This may be surprising
because territorial rights theorists, more than perhaps any other group of political philosophers,
have thought about what could link people to particular places. These theorists – trying to answer
the fundamental question of how we might resolve territorial disputes among contending polities
– have zeroed in on, in effect, two core problems:
Social Ontology:
In virtue of what does any combination of things count as the kind of
corporate or collective agency that could claim territorial rights?
Attachment:
In virtue of what does any particular agency of this kind count as
connected or linked to any particular place, such that anyone outside the
group could be bound to respect that link?
S5
Despite their official concern for linkages between people and places, liberal theorists of
territory have not departed from liberal anthropocentrism. On the social ontology question, every
single approach to date that I know of is anthropocentric. Individualist Lockean theories, such as
those of Hillel Steiner and A. John Simmons, treat all and only individual human beings as the
fundamental bearers of rights; everything nonhuman is a resource. Cara Nine, Margaret Moore,
Paulina Ochoa Espejo, Anna Stilz, and other theorists of “peoples” generally give no thought to
2
Tim Hayward, “Some Critical Questions for Liberal Cosmopolitans,” Journal of Social Philosophy (2009): 284.
2
nonhumans, but are concerned to explain how an individualist ontology can yield a collective
“people.” Nationalist work is the same: nations are intergenerationally unified collections of
individuals who have a kind of mutual recognition and a sense of shared history and political
destiny. Their mutual recognition is realized in the form of a “daily plebiscite” or an “imagined
community”. Nothing and no one who lacks the intellectual capacity for such national
imaginaries or acts of daily assent could be a full or direct member of the nation. Even, to be
frank, my own account of ‘ethnogeographic communities’ seems to make room only for human
beings, since it is we who materially interact and have an as-if shared ontology of land.
Things only get worse for liberal theories of attachment. Here, theorists of territory say little that
could slow, let alone halt, the liberal murder-suicide. Simmons holds that stewardship is at least a
permissible end, but his requirement of efficient use that leaves enough and as good for others
who are currently living suggests that stewardship will be the poor stepchild among allowable
uses. We may not, on his view, say that the oil that is under our feet is off-limits; if someone else
can “drink our milkshake,” then the oil is theirs.3 Left-libertarians like Steiner have perhaps more
resources with which to build stewardship into the equation; but while Steiner’s ‘global fund’
might ensure that enough and as good is left for others in perpetuity, it comes at the cost of
having any attachment criterion at all – there is no particularity. And in both Lockean cases, as
long as everything that is nonhuman counts as a resource, the question is not whether it can be
exploited but only when and by whom.
Similarly, although Nine has recently refined her collectivist semi-Lockean theory by thinking
holistically about riverbeds and watersheds and their implications for the object of territorial
claims, I still see no indication that the criterion of attachment requires recognition of nonhuman
3
A. John Simmons, Boundaries of Authority (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).
3
claims or stewardship in perpetuity. Nine’s account, however, at least grounds attachment in the
establishment of justice in a place; this could enable her to strengthen this demand to require not
only justice but also sustainability. Other Occupancy theorists have less capacity to do so. For
whereas occupancy for Nine means that the people does something special to the land – namely,
establishes justice there – for Moore and Stilz, as well as for nationalists like Meisels and Gans,
Occupancy means that the land does something special for the people.4 Yet it might do that
special thing to them only by giving up more than it can sustain. And the people seem to have no
special obligation to return the favor.
Indeed – lest this seem unfair or straw-mannish – let me emphasize that if anything, theorists of
territory have moved away from stewardship, and they have done so intentionally. The reason is
that Lockean theories are seen as having imposed an unshared and Eurocentric conception of
“efficiency,” and as having imposed that conception on non-Europeans, with the consequence
that First Nations and other non-European peoples are regarded as using their land inefficiently,
or indeed, as not being there at all.5 Non-Lockean theorists of territory have largely responded to
this by abjuring any efficiency criterion – by denying that there was anything that anyone had to
do to merit a territorial claim other than simply to be there, and indeed, what counts for being
there has also been hollowed out.6 Consequently even the most rapacious, environmentally
cataclysmic uses of land count as evidence of presence. One potential exception to this trend,
David Miller, has moved from being an Occupancy theorist to requiring the creation of ‘value’ in
a place, but his criterion of ‘universal value’ seems to assume, and perhaps privileges,
mainstream economic and political values, so he does not challenge those whose conception of
Chaim Gans, Limits of Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
Margaret Moore, 1999 book.
6 See Tamar Meisels, Territorial Rights; David Miller, National Responsibility and Global Justice.
4
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4
value-creation is environmentally destructive, provided it does not worsen the situation for
liberal values.
The motive for this retreat from stewardship has been laudable – namely, the rejection of
Eurocentrism and the desire to treat indigenous claims as territorial rights. And while I think the
strategy fails even at this, my concern here is that the retreat from stewardship ends up giving
territorial claimants a license to commit environmental destruction. In short, then, despite the fact
that their subject-matter should be about linking people to particular places, and so they should
be thinking carefully about the nature of place and the environment to which people are thereby
linked, liberal theorists of territory have not departed from the standard liberal embrace of
perpetual growth and the extractive economy.
This orientation contrasts with a wide range of critics of liberalism and anthropocentrism
more broadly, who deny that humans are gods but instead regard us as ensconced within and
responsible to a more-than-human world.
To be sure, the liberal might reply, liberalism has work to do. Yet there are good anthropocentric
reasons to care for the land; that liberals have learned this late does not impugn liberalism, but is
part of the tragedy of the human condition in the 21st century. And it will be liberal values that
rescue us, if anything can, from this impending catastrophe without sacrificing all we have
gained, from democracy and independent judiciaries to civil society to free markets. The
problem is that anthropocentric liberal environmentalism can only caution against the risk of
blowback. But then the risk of blowback is just a cost that has to be weighed against other human
aspirations, and our care for nature can only be instrumental. Even a precautionary principle
5
seems to be on dubious liberal footing.7 At each moment the near-term gains will loom larger
than the long-term losses – not least because so much long-term loss is already locked in8 – and
once again animals and the larger environment will bear the cost. We need instead a political
theory of the more-than-human world, which accords to that world a kind of political agency –
claim rights and powers that can carry weight against human aspirations.
S6
In their landmark book Zoopolis, Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka defend a compelling
account of political agency for nonhuman animals that supports a genuinely liberal
nonanthropocentrism – a liberal theory of limits on human rapacity. Their liberal political theory
of animal rights expands the polity to include nonhuman animals and respect for their rights as
political actors, while also avoiding romanticism or so-called ‘eco-fascism’.9 Their strategy is to
use citizenship theory to divide the animal kingdom into three political categories: domesticated
citizens, liminal denizens, and wilderness sovereigns.10 Each class of animals is politically equal
to humans, though what this equality entails differs by category. Consequently, domesticated
animals are elevated to the status of coequal citizens of an interspecies human-animal society,
liminal animals are regarded as ‘resident aliens’ within that interspecies society, and wilderness
animal populations are single-species sovereigns whose territories densely overlap those of other
species.
Zoopolis represents not just an emancipatory theory of animal citizenship and sovereignty, but a
liberal theory of human limits. By directly including and recognizing animals, Donaldson and
John Broome, Climate Matters (New York: Norton, 2011), p.
See Stephen M. Gardiner, A Perfect Moral Storm (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
9 This charge is due to Tom Regan, The Case for Animal Rights (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1983). For more recent discussion see Seth Crook, “Callicott’s Land Communitarianism,” Journal of Applied
Philosophy 19 (2002), 175-84.
10 Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka, Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights. New York: Oxford University
Press, 2011.
7
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Kymlicka deliver an indirect concern for wild nature as a whole, since that is animal territory.
And by shying away from full-on liberal cosmopolitanism they at least make possible an escape
route from the murder-suicide.
In the current paper I assume that Donaldson and Kymlicka are right that nonhuman animals
must be integrated, somehow or other, into political theory not just as moral patients but as
political agents. Yet I argue that their mode of doing so – principally in the form of the tripartite
division and the priority given to domesticated animal citizens – ultimately yields an incomplete
and ecologically inadequate normative theory. My principal focus will be the territorial rights of
wilderness animals, for I want to demonstrate that by asking questions that are germane to
territorial rights in the human context, we get a better picture of wild animal sovereignty. Yet
more importantly for me going forward, by asking these questions about wild animal
sovereignty, we also get a better picture of human territorial rights. Ultimately, the alternative I
propose will jump off from the situation of what Donaldson and Kymlicka call liminal denizens,
because these animals merit respect as part of a multispecies community integrated in virtue of
material interaction rather than mutual recognition. In making this case I use some concepts that
I have developed for human territories, namely, those of ethnogeography, ethnogeographic
community, and plenitude, connecting these concepts to ecological ones such as resilience. In
this way I’ll try to give some specific meaning to Aldo Leopold’s call for us to be “plain
member[s] and citizen[s] of the biotic community.”11 At the same time, it is my intention to
honor the moral vision of Zoopolis by insisting on the recognition of nonhuman animals as
political actors in their own right – whether or not they are domesticated.
11
Aldo Leopold, “The Land Ethic,” in A Sand County Almanac (New York: Oxford University Press, year), page.
7
Zoopolis: insiders vs. outsiders
I begin with an extended discussion of the theory in Zoopolis. Donaldson and Kymlicka are
liberal democrats about how contemporary postindustrial democracies should be organized.
Hence on their view the state should be evaluated on the basis of its contribution to the welfare
of its citizens and the justice of its institutions. Their great leap is to insist that animals, too, can
count as citizens. The argument for this is not simply the traditional Animal Rights Theory claim
that animals are moral patients, or subjects of a life, but the liberal one that domesticated
animals, at least, are active contributors to society. They are our family members, our friends,
and our coworkers. Like humans, domesticated animals are capable of regulating their natural
instincts and willingly complying with social norms. Moreover, such incapacities as they do
manifest may well be tied to their oppression; for instance, domesticated animals remain
incapable of finding their own food and slavishly dependent on human affection, but this is a
consequence of, not a justification for, the fact of their being dominated by us. Humans who
belittle animals’ intellect and self-efficacy are following a long line of arrogant victim-blamers
that includes Aristotle, Jefferson, and far too many philosophers. Domesticated animals have
been incorporated into our society as an oppressed caste, and it is time for emancipation.12
S8
But although Donaldson and Kymlicka extend the polity in this important way, they are
inconsistent on what it means to be a people or polity as such. Internally, in the multispecies
human-animal polity, they treat citizenship as having two distinct grounds: freedom of
association, and contribution. Freedom of association is a bidirectional right – a right that each
individual has, but that each can exercise only if it is consummated by another who wants to
associate with them. Where two willing associates meet, society becomes possible. But full
12
This paragraph is a précis of the Zoopolis argument for citizenship for domesticated animals.
8
citizenship requires more than free association; it requires in addition contribution. Liminal
animals, for instance, live amongst us. They participate in society in various ways and could
even be thought to contribute to it by, for instance, clearing litter, aerating soil, and so on. Their
way of life is closely connected to ours. But they do not, by and large, want to interact with us on
shared terms of cooperation, and the feeling tends to be mutual. In Zoopolis these denizens are
thus resident aliens; they have a right to life and to place, but not to full citizenship. Thus the
mutual desire to associate also grounds shared membership. Domesticated animals, on the other
hand, also contribute to society, but they do so on shared terms of cooperation subject, for the
most part, to mutual freedom of association. They are our family members, friends, and
coworkers, and we are theirs. Thus full membership in the multispecies human-animal society
has a dual foundation in freedom of association and contribution.13
Wilderness animals, by contrast, are distinct peoples with political status, not mere
individuals. Yet in their case the criterion of membership shifts from freedom of association and
cooperation to simple species membership. Individual nonhuman animals are capable of
mutually consensual interaction and contribution to joint ventures on shared terms of
cooperation. But they do not undertake these activities as species. By the same token, animals
often do cooperate and interact across species lines. But they do not thereby come to share
polities. For Donaldson and Kymlicka wilderness animal polities are species, irrespective of the
scope of cooperation or association.
Donaldson and Kymlicka do not, as far as I can see, specify whether liminal animals should be understood as
peoples or as individuals. Perhaps it depends on whether and to what extent individual raccoons or rabbits want to
live together; in this case peoplehood would continue to be built on freedom of association. But either alternative
seems odd. If they are free agents, members of no polity, then they are political anomalies. Even Lockean
voluntarists do not fathom anarchist independents living among us. But if they are members of polities, it remains
unclear what constitutes them as such. And in this case, though not anarchist independents they are stateless peoples.
13
9
Following the bifurcated social ontology is a bifurcated theory of attachment. Whereas citizens
and denizens have rights to place that require humans’ respect for their practices, wilderness
sovereigns have territorial rights. These rights are held by the species as a whole. And instead of
multispecies shared territories, Donaldson and Kymlicka envision the world as carved up into
densely overlapping but politically distinct territories, each belonging to a particular species.
Thus only internally are there nonbiological criteria of membership, and only internally can a
society be a multispecies polity. Externally, among wilderness animals, the membership criteria
are biological and the territory is, too.
Thus Zoopolis is built on a tripartite division of nonhuman animals, but a dual political
structure, with one set of rules internally and another set externally.
Occupancy and the Territorial Rights of Wilderness Animals
S9
The first question is whether any available theory of territorial rights can account for
Zoopolis by treating nonhumans as political agents with valid claims to territory. And the
second, inverse, question is whether any class of animals – under the tripartite division – can
claim territorial rights. In this section I want to show that the answer to each of these questions
seems to be negative; that Donaldson and Kymlicka lack the resources to affirm that animals
have rights to, as they say, “be there and to determine the shape of their communal life,” and
even that wilderness animals are “territorial-based communities.”
S10
Donaldson and Kymlicka offer an extended defense of the territorial rights of wilderness
animals, and so it is on this class that I will focus here. Following a strategy familiar in the
animal rights literature, they argue that extending recognition to animals is analogous to the prior
and morally required extension of recognition to non-European peoples. They admit that animals
10
are incapable of achieving a level of institutional realization of the sort that characterizes the
modern state, but they insist that it is not required, noting that “most human communities
throughout history” “fail to pass this threshold.” S11 Instead, borrowing from Jo-Anne
Pemberton, Donaldson and Kymlicka propose a social ontology of peoplehood meriting
sovereignty that rests on four criteria: in order to have a valid claim to sovereignty, a community,
be it human or animal, must:
i)
have an independent existence;
ii)
place value upon it,
iii)
resist alien rule, and
iv)
have recognizable interests in their social organization.14
When these tests are passed, “we have the moral purposes that call for sovereignty” (173). And –
though most of their examples are birds or mammals – Donaldson and Kymlicka insist that by
and large wild animals pass these tests.
Species are not Political Communities
S12
Each of these criteria is problematic in the case of people, and is even more so in the case
of animals. With regard to the first criterion, the concept of species is no more natural than race
or gender. Biologists treat species as an essentially plural notion; what is meant by ‘species’
depends on what field one is in or what question one is asking – questions of energy transfer, of
reproduction, of genetic derivation, etc.15 In many cases, for ecological purposes the species is
far too large a category because what become threatened are particular populations; by numbers,
Donaldson & Kymlicka 173, citing Jo-Anne Pemberton, Sovereignty: Interpretations (Basingstoke: Palgrave
MacMillan, 2009), p. 130. I have suppressed their quotation marks for clarity and fluidity.
15 Jon Jensen, “Cutting Nature at the Seams,” in Nature’s Edge, ed. Charles Brown and Ted Toadvine (Albany:
SUNY Press, 2007), 61-82.
14
11
a species might seem to be perfectly healthy even as every single population of that species is
threatened. This seems to be the case with Pacific salmon.16 In other cases, the species is far too
small a category for political or ethological purposes, because most if not all animals live in
densely intermingled interspecies social environments. For every herd of bison or pod of whales
or gaggle of geese, there are numerous and overlapping relationships of predation, symbiosis,
and competition both within and across species lines. For one reason or the other, then – it is too
broad or too narrow – there is no polity, no community, called the species.
Also like race and gender, shared species membership does not predict whether any given pair of
organisms is likely to live together, behave similarly for political purposes, or interact socially.
Consequently, there is no reason to suppose that animals will value their species-level
independence. Donaldson and Kymlicka claim that animals meet the minimal sovereignty
threshold of “the ability to respond to the challenges that a community faces, and to provide a
social context in which its individual members can grow and flourish.”17 This seems true; but it
seems typically false that the species meets this criterion. Animals do not organize at the species
level.
In other words, it is as much of a mistake to treat animals as single-species communities as it is
to treat all humans as a single-species community. We are separated from one another, and
unified with other species. One might say that Donaldson and Kymlicka are ironically guilty of a
kind of intrinsic political speciesism here: treating species as a politically and ultimately morally
significant difference between organisms, when it is not one.18
Ibid.
Zoopolis, 175.
18 On ‘intrinsic racism’ see K.A. Appiah, In My Father’s House (INFO).
16
17
12
S13
Yet if it is hard to theorize species as peoples, it is also hard to see exactly how to
theorize ‘peoples’ so as to include animals at all. There is too much diversity for any one account
of the people to capture all and only those groupings that are politically salient. It is not exactly
that nature is boundaryless; nature is shot through with boundaries of all kinds, on all scales. It is
rather that no set of boundaries is consistent and canonical for any general purpose, the way
political boundaries are, or purport to be, among people. What is needed is an account that can
accommodate the manifold divisions and unities in the natural world.
Presence is not Occupancy
Even if we granted to Donaldson and Kymlicka this social ontology of sovereign peoplehood, we
would still need to consider their account of attachment to territory. Recall that, for territorial
rights – rights to particular places – we need to show not just that someone needs, wants, or even
has a right to be somewhere or other; we need to show, in addition, that they have a right to be
somewhere in particular. This is the problem of attachment. And even if animal species meet the
four criteria of sovereign peoplehood, that would not attach them to any particular territory.
S14
To address the latter question, Donaldson & Kymlicka adopt an occupancy account.
Occupancy theorists are unified by the fact that, in one way or another, being there is what
grounds a territorial claim to a particular place. This may, but need not, run in a bottom-up
direction, where collective occupancy supervenes on sites of individual residency; and as noted
earlier the significance of the link may rest in what the people do for the place, or in what the
place does for the people. The latter is most common; Moore, Meisels, and Stilz, for instance,
give rich accounts of how the place matters for the people, and then argue that those aspects of
people’s lives are morally significant and hence should be protected and promoted by state
institutions.
13
Like Moore and Stilz, Donaldson and Kymlicka propose a bottom-up, place-for-people account
of Occupancy. Other things equal, they argue, both human and animal communities have a prima
facie claim to be where they find themselves.19 Notwithstanding the unjust history of settler
colonialism that has reshaped the environment often beyond repair,
[a] plausible political theory of territory has to start from the facts on the ground (where
people currently live, and the boundaries of existing communities and states).20
S15
Grant for a moment that this is correct: that current presence is the first fact of political
recognition.21 Occupancy might then seem to be especially convenient because it is directly
observable: if people X is there, then the place is occupied by X; if not, then not. Unfortunately,
things are not so easy. Some peoples are – perhaps most peoples throughout history have been –
nomadic, and where they are now, in their daily lives during this season, says little about their
larger “located life plan.” If this is true of humans it is all the more so of animals, since most
wilderness animal species don’t live in complex sedentary societies, and many of them migrate
thousands of miles from one season to the next.22
What Donaldson and Kymlicka seem to have in mind, however, is that we can pin peoples and
groups down to core habitats:
It is one thing to say that a bird has a property right in its nest, or that a wolf has a
property right in its den—specific bits of territory used exclusively by one animal family.
But the habitat that animals need to survive extends far beyond such specific and
exclusive bits of territory—animals often need to fly or roam over vast territories shared
Zoopolis, 192.
Zoopolis, 193.
21 Though I’ll challenge it in a moment.
22 Donaldson and Kymlicka do, of course, acknowledge this. My point, as developed below
19
20
14
by many other animals. Protecting a bird’s nest is of little help if the nearby watering
holes are polluted, or if tall buildings block its flight path.23
This is surely correct, but nailing down animals’ habitats does not determine occupancy. Our
account of their habitat will be a theory of what they use, where they get it, what they are using it
for, and whether that use constitutes meeting needs. These are social and political judgments,
encompassing both the animals’ decisions as well as certain counterfactuals such as whether
their decisions are constrained by anything significant, and whether those constraints are morally
tolerable or constitute wrongful restrictions. When salmon confront dams, over time they lose
their migratory instinct such that they don’t come back even when the dam is removed. Whether
the erstwhile salmon run is still a salmon run seems to depend on which evolutionary stage is
regulative and whether human intervention that alters reproductive habits is itself natural, and so
part of a dynamic equilibrium, or an external intervention that undermines that equilibrium.
These are again complex theoretic, and indeed normative questions, not simple empirical ones.
The implication is that, in each case, the mere presence or absence of a population in a place –
again, supposing we knew what polity the population constituted, and even whether the
population was anything other than an artifact of our counting – is not a natural observable fact
but already presupposes both moral evaluation and specification of social ontological questions
on which different societies will diverge.
Occupancy is not Attachment
S16
Supposing again that we could settle the nature of group ontology and the location that
any given group occupied, however, we would still need to determine whether the group was
23
Zoopolis, page.
15
attached in a normatively significant way to the place that it occupied. What this problem
demands is a distinction between a political right – sovereign power over a constituted juridical
territory – and something more ethological, like mere habitat.
Consider cats and rabbits. In North America and Australia, domestic and feral cats are an
invasive species. In Australia, rabbits are an invasive species. In each case, it was European
expansion that brought these invaders to lands where they have no or few natural predators, and
where they lay waste the natural environment. Cats are mass murderers and vectors of extinction.
In the US, domestic and feral cats kill up to 3.7 billion birds and anywhere from 6.9 billion to
20.7 billion small mammals every year.24 They are hardly less destructive in Australia, but there
the story of rabbits is better known. Since introduction some 150 years ago, rabbits have laid
waste the natural environment of virtually the entire continent, causing desertification, making
vast swathes of Australia uninhabitable for many other animals and ruining the terrestrial base of
indigenous livelihoods.25 Yet it is not just invasives that have gone wild in the face of European
encroachment. Australia is now a far better habitat for the kangaroo than it ever was before.
According to the government of New South Wales, the population of red kangaroos has trebled
in the past decade while grey kangaroos have more than doubled, with each species topping the 6
million mark.26
Alas, cats are now in North America, and rabbits are in Australia, and the fact of their
presence is unlikely to change. But do they have a right to be there? Donaldson and Kymlicka
Juliet Eilperin, “Outdoor Cats Kill between 1.4 billion and 3.7 billion birds a year, study says.” Washington Post
1/31/13 (https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/outdoor-cats-kill-between-14-billion-and-37billion-birds-a-year-study-says/2013/01/31/2504f744-6bbe-11e2-ada0-5ca5fa7ebe79_story.html). Accessed 11/1/16.
25 Wendy Zukerman, “Australia’s battle with the bunny,” ABC Science 4/8/09
(http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2009/04/08/2538860.htm). Accessed 11/1/16.
26 http://www.environment.nsw.gov.au/wildlifemanagement/KMPPopulationEstimatesWest.htm (accessed 2/27/17).
24
16
seem required to treat domesticated cats as our fellow citizens, whereas feral cats and rabbits are
denizens, and most of the rabbits that destroy the Outback are wilderness sovereigns. Treated as
political agents, cats and rabbits epitomize settler colonialism with its concomitant ethnic
cleansing and ecological imperialism. They extirpate competitors and reshape entire
environments. From a bird’s perspective, by protecting feline citizens we are harboring terrorists
that make irregular forays out into avian communities to kill innocent civilians. If it was
legitimate for the US-led coalition to strike Afghanistan for harboring Al-Qaida, then, it would
seem that the birds and the rats would be justified in launching a Hitchcockian assault on us.
More to the point, these occupants are not culpable for their presence in the Americas or
Australia, or for the natural instincts that lead them to act as they do. But most people also deny
that contemporary Euro-Americans are culpable for their presence in the Americas or Australia.
All these groups nonetheless remain settler colonialists. Their occupancy is morally problematic
for that reason. Which is to say that occupancy does not answer the moral question of
attachment, but leaves it open. Hence occupancy is not a successful theory of attachment.
Moreover, completely absent from the occupancy criterion is the question of sustainability.
Inasmuch as the scope of occupancy is given not by the specific concatenation of sites on which
people are resident, but rather the zone required for meeting needs in the way that the given
group does so, the Occupancy criterion creates a moral hazard as groups gain an incentive for
needing more space.
Against the Tripartite Division
If species are not peoples, presence is not occupancy, and occupancy is not attachment, then how
can we recognize animal sovereignty or animals’ political rights at all? To be sure, it remains
possible to concede that we humans are the only real political agents, the real citizens, the only
17
ones who, in Aristotelian terms, share both in rule and in being ruled. The ongoing collapse of
wild animal populations is dangerous enough for human survival that we can derive purely
anthropocentric reasons for opposing it.
Yet it is worth rehearsing some of the good reasons to join Donaldson and Kymlicka in going
beyond anthropocentrism. First, the Aristotelian conception of citizenship infamously makes that
status unavailable even to all humans. As animal rights theorists have argued all along, there is
no line such that all humans are “above” it and all animals “below”. Second, the flipside of the
first point: if regarding certain beings as political agents is necessary for treating them with due
respect and dignity, rather than just paternalistically, and if all sentient or self-moving creatures
at least are entitled to being treated with due respect and dignity, then political recognition must
be pursued for that reason. Natural facts about each – for instance, distinctive cognitive
capacities and forms of flourishing – help determine what is required for due respect and dignity,
and hence for political agency, but within the realm of self-moving creatures we do not condition
respect and dignity on any further performance criterion.27 And finally, in an anthropocentric
world, at bottom everything nonhuman is a resource; in addition to the epistemic or practical risk
that we will underestimate the real value of these nonhuman things, there is the deeper worry,
emphasized by ecofeminists, that the logic of domination cannot be kept outside the human
community – that this ideology seeps in at the cracks and underwrites oppressive relations
among humans. Viewing ourselves as gods on Earth, or as God’s representative on Earth, is bad
for everyone.
So if we accept that it is important to include animals in political theory as political agents rather
than mere moral patients, the remaining question is how we should do so. Although I have
27
For discussion see Michael Bérubé, [cite].
18
focused on the problem of recognizing the territorial rights of wilderness animal sovereigns, I
think the root problem for Zoopolis is the dual structure of the polity – a multispecies polity
founded on free association and contribution for insiders, and a single, intrinsically speciesist
order for outsiders – and more deeply, the tripartite division that generates it. S17 The tripartite
division treats as a prepolitical fact what is actually a political one, namely, the place of animals
within and around our political life. By beginning the theory of animal inclusion from that
division, Donaldson and Kymlicka define animals in terms of their relationship to human
society. This seems to turn Zoopolitanism into what Charles Mills has called a Herrenvolk ethic,
with humans as the master race.28 Lest the anthropocentrist see this fact and take heart that
Zoopolitanism turns out to be a smaller tent than it seemed, there is a further problem that
perhaps illustrates the ecofeminist point that you can’t stop dominating at the species boundary.
That is, the tripartite division does not even make all humans into the Herrenvolk. Rather, as
Paul Nadasdy has pointed out, this supposedly empirical criterion is in fact a western liberal one,
rejecting First Nations accounts according to which “the land and all beings upon it” are
recognized as fellow citizens.29
We are all Liminal Denizens Now
If we are committed to move beyond anthropocentrism, and yet by the same token we cannot
adopt the tripartite division, what is the alternative? We need to determine the nature and scope
of animal polities, our place in those polities, the nature of attachment to particular places, and
what claims follow on such attachment.
Charles Mills, Blackness Visible (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999).
Paul Nadasdy, “First Nations, Citizenship, and Animals, or Why Northern Indigenous People Might Not Want to
Live in Zoopolis,” Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique 49 (2016), 1-20.
28
29
19
In answering these questions I think particular insight comes from the situation of what
Donaldson and Kymlicka call liminal denizens. In Zoopolis these creatures turn out to be
genuinely liminal, a boundary case. On an Occupancy theory like those of Moore and Stilz,
which value humans’ ‘located life plans,’ we are stuck with the uncomfortable fact that liminal
denizens tend to enter human plans as enemies, nuisances, or playthings rather than as neighbors
or immigrants. Their presence among us is grounded in our material interaction, often wary or
hostile, rather than in mutual recognition, a desire to associate, or any shared history, biology, or
destiny. Yet despite our at-best ambivalent attitude toward liminal denizens, our interactions are
genuinely dense; walking in the city we are arguably more likely to interact, or come into close
contact, with liminal denizens than with domesticated animals, and in many cases, more likely
denizens than people.
S18
At the outset I noted that the difference between liminal denizens and domesticated
citizens was not mutual interaction or even contribution, since both of those characterize our
relations with denizens, but voluntary association. At this point we must return to that
observation and point out that voluntary association has little to do with the unification of human
society either. Social ontologies that rely on a mutual recognition condition, such as those of
Moore and Miller, founder on this point. For Rawlsian liberals, the hypothetical contract
structure is an attempt to render our political association acceptable enough that we would or
could choose it, even though we were never given the chance to opt in or out. So it seems odd to
make the free association criterion a disqualifier for nonhumans. Rather, we should pursue a
social ontology grounded in productive material interactions rather than in voluntary association.
By that criterion, so-called liminal denizens would be at home in multi-species human-animal
20
societies as much as you or I. Indeed, given Rawls’s point that none of us really ever chose one
another, it might be better to affirm that we are all liminal denizens now.
S19
My own approach to territorial rights is grounded in a social ontology of productive
material interactions rather than mutual recognition. I proposed the concept of an
“ethnogeographic community” – a group with an “as-if” shared ontology of land and deeply
interacting land-use practices. Just in virtue of existing, ethnogeographic communities are in two
respects intrinsically connected to places. For they are structured by ontologies of land in the
sense that they are the legal, economic, and social manifestation of certain beliefs – about what
has value, about how roles and entities are to be distributed in space, about what to put onto and
into the Earth and what to take out of it. Not everyone has to share these beliefs, but they end up
compelled to act as if they did. For instance, although I reject contemporary liberal capitalism as
a mode of political and economic organization, I live in a house that I own on a residential street,
I commute to a job where I work for pay, I send my kids to school on a school bus, I buy most of
my groceries from a supermarket, I fly long distances to meet with colleagues, and so on.
Notwithstanding some minor tweaks and some political action to oppose it, I live it although I
think it is fatally and fundamentally flawed. Hence, that ontology of land accounts for my
behavior irrespective of my attitudes. Moreover, the values and structures that are manifest in
this shared form of life are built out of mutually formative interactions with the land, often at a
very localized level. The Midwestern flat grid city that began as a grain market, a post office, and
a railroad junction is a different beast from the rust belt industrial city of hills that began as a
river port and a meat processing center. This is not to say that just anyone who settled in what’s
now Indianapolis or Cincinnati would have done the same thing. To the contrary. The land and
the people interact in mutually formative ways, which means that people who had arrived with
21
different assumptions and values would have interacted in different ways with the same place,
changed it and been changed by it in different ways, and so on.
S20
Ethnogeographic communities, then, are populations built up around a dense network of
evolving land-use practices, practices that imply evolving values and ontologies. People share an
ethnogeographic community solely in virtue of being in the same dense network and living in
pretty much the same way. Though mutual recognition is, of course, a likely effect of sharing an
ethnogeographic community, it is not required. Nor is attachment to land a matter of occupancy.
Occupancy demands both too much and too little: too much because communities might carve
out large areas, such as the Yellowstone to Yukon Ecoregion, where human settlement is
discouraged and built-up areas are intentionally sparse. The Occupancy theorist has to regard this
as a kind of emptiness or expensive taste, open to challenge in the event that settlers arrive. By
the same token, Occupancy demands too little because it requires mere presence. In my view, it
is legitimate to expect that ethnogeographic communities will plan their interactions with their
environment so as to achieve what I call ‘plenitude’ or fullness. The idea here is not that the
place has been filled with stuff, but that the claimants can see it as such because they recognize
the internal diversity of the place, and its distinctness from other places, and they have a plan to
maintain the diversity and distinctness in perpetuity. Plenitude is ultimately a kind of knowledge
of diversity; that diversity may be intentionally constructed, but it might also be learned and
recognized. Like the ethnogeography and the land itself, plenitude evolves; what is required is
not the maintenance of land uses as they’ve always been, though that is not ruled out, but rather
the maintenance of internal diversity and external distinctiveness.
There are, of course, open questions about ethnogeographic communities, including, I admit,
whether they are social-scientifically valid – whether ‘ethnogeographic community’ ever enters
22
as an independent variable in any valid causal explanation. Of course, concepts like ‘nation’,
‘culture’, and ‘people’ are in at least as much trouble on this score, as are social networks and, as
I argued above, species, populations, and so on. It seems likely that neither in the human sciences
nor in Ecology are there any social categories that serve as independent variables in
exceptionless causal generalizations. Yet these categories do too much work for us to deny that
they have theoretic use. Another point to flag is that plenitude requires perpetuity. I cash out
perpetuity in terms of community or ecological resilience.30 Resilience is a kind of sustainability
– the capacity to return to equilibrium after shock or disruption. Resilience is essential to
territorial rights for two reasons. First, intrinsically, human locusts – those who arrive, lay waste,
leave brownfields, and move on – do nothing that merits respect from the perspective of
territorial rights. Such use or occupancy cannot justify a right to the territory one is destroying.
Second, no one from outside the locust group could possibly accept such a territorial claim,
because as long as it is implicit in the claim that the people will move on, this approach to land
renders everyone else insecure in their own territory.
Before saying more about resilience we must address head-on the challenge of Zoopolis. The
ethnogeographic community seems to be an anthropocentric concept inasmuch as it is supposed
to account for human interaction with the land taken as shorthand for the environment as a
whole. To be sure, if ontologies of land differ then the line between ‘human’ and ‘environment’
will be drawn in different places and with different effects. But this just exacerbates the
anthropocentrism, because it does not seem as though nonhumans count as ethnogeographic
communities, and given differing ethnogeographies we have to imagine that at least some if not
all of these will treat nonhuman animals as entities that can be used for work and killed for food
30
These are distinct notions but I have not yet worked out whether I think the distinction makes a difference here.
23
and other products. I need here to try to theorize the multispecies polity within the framework of
ethnogeographic communities pursuing plenitude.
The solution is to ground shared polities in a kind of contribution or causal interaction, and to
cash out contribution in terms of plenitude. Take these in reverse order.
Contribution to Plenitude
My strategy is to build an account of plenitude out of Aldo Leopold’s conception of the land
pyramid. I want to emphasize at the outset that I do not do this because I think Leopold has the
correct ecological approach to the natural environment. To the contrary, as I noted above in
critique of the tripartite division, ecological approaches to the natural environment are already
structured by normative and ontological commitments. Rather, I use the land pyramid because it
supports a powerful and feasible account of a multispecies polity, and generates two crucial
measures of resilience.
S21
The Land Pyramid is a system for cycling solar energy through trophic levels, first into
plants from the sun, then into animals either directly or indirectly from plants, and then back
down into the soil from the waste and decomposition of plants and animals. The proper
functioning of this system makes all life possible.
S22
The multispecies community represented by the land pyramid has more of a case to be
recognized as a politically significant organized collective than does the species or the nation,
and each individual’s place in the Land Pyramid locates that individual relative to the production
and maintenance of important goods in a way that mere “occupancy” of a particular place does
not. By the same token, the land pyramid is intrinsically located, in several respects. First,
although the pyramid itself is socially constructed, it is constructed out of a particular material
24
environment that exists at a particular time. The time in question is both about what Leopold
called “succession”, which he thought was inherent in the land, and about time scales,
specifically geological, evolutionary, historical, and biographical time. Thus the land pyramid of
the buffalo commons of the Great Plains is distinct from that of the Rocky Mountains and that of
the Great Lakes. Nonetheless, neither spatially nor temporally does the land pyramid have
impermeable boundaries. The boundaries between time scales and places are rough, and although
they refer to natural phenomena they are not themselves fully natural. It is through the social
construction of the located land pyramid, and the enhancement of biodiversity within, that
plenitude – internal diversity and external distinctiveness – is achieved in the land pyramid. And
given that the land pyramid then embodies plenitude, it can be a source of norms.
The question is what these norms demand of any of us – humans as well as nonhumans.
The answer to that question will generate a theory of territorial rights in the multispecies polity.
S23
The Land Pyramid is not static, but dynamic. Not just the energy circulating through it
but the size of the pyramid is in flux over time. Evolution, as Leopold tells us, tends to increase
the size of the pyramid, make it higher and wider. This means that trophic levels are added over
evolutionary time, and the number of species at each level increases. At the same time, in
geological time, the fundamental character of the pyramid changes through erosion,
sedimentation, volcanic and seismic events, and so on.
By stark contrast, humans, at least in industrialized societies, tend to make the pyramid
shorter and narrower by driving mass extinctions and speeding up processes of geological
change. J. Baird Callicott has proposed grounding a Leopoldean Land Ethic in temporal scales
rather than spatial ones. The idea is that daily life is carried out in biological time, yet one of the
principal ways humans ruin the environment is by speeding up geological time until it moves as
25
fast as biological time, such that living things are unable to adapt. Beach erosion, as he notes, is
natural, and so a certain amount of beach use is compatible with the maintenance of the
boundary between temporal scales; but what we do is use beaches so intensively that the erosion
of an epoch happens over a single summer. Similarly, extinction is a normal occurrence, and
normally does not undermine the resilience of ecosystems because niches are taken over by
newcomers. But we accelerate extinction to such a rate that whole ecosystems collapse as niches
cannot be filled due to reduced numbers and variety.31
S24
To be a “plain member and citizen” of the biotic community can be understood, then, as
contributing to the Land Pyramid by expanding it or at least not shrinking it – constructing and
maintaining spatial and temporal boundaries, increasing or not decreasing the diversity at each
trophic level, and expanding or not reducing the number of trophic levels. This, I suggest, is the
appropriate performance criterion to demand not just of people but of animals. Our enmity
toward cats and rabbits – or at least, my enmity toward them – is then founded in the same
commitments as my enmity toward postindustrial capitalism. By contrast, apex predators and
other keystone species, as well as human communities that have managed ecosystems in
diversity-enhancing ways, thereby gain territorial rights.
S25
I noted at the outset that territorial rights theories have moved away from performance
criteria because those seem to impose unshared conceptions of the good and particularly to
valorize Euro-American land-use patterns. Yet I have embraced a performance criterion. But
here, resilience cuts most deeply against the contemporary practices of industrialized societies,
and it is we whose right to place is most in doubt. And that is as it should be.
31
J. Baird Callicott, “,” in Charles S. Brown and Ted Toadvine (2008).
26
The Multispecies Polity
S26
In explaining contribution I have suggested the conception of the multispecies polity. As
I’ve sketched it, this polity is contained within the land pyramid. Our interactions are dense
inasmuch as we are nodes in a cyclical energy transfer. The stuff of my body was once the soil
and the air and the water and the plants and the animals, and will be again.
Territorial rights thus link particular subjects to particular places, but those places are
characterized in ecological and ethnogeographic terms. There is no one globally shared
conception of land. To be attached to some land is to cocreate it, both cognitively, through the
ontology of land that evaluates and explains what is done there, and practically, by doing or
failing to do those things.
Objections and Limits
27
It may be objected that this account relies on an outdated and romanticized ecological
notion, that of the Land Pyramid, and also grabs onto another concept, resilience, that is
dangerously underspecified and subject to misapplication or worse. It is true that our most
beloved ecological concepts are shot through with normativity.32 Ecology cannot ground
political morality because ecology already is, in part, a political morality. But nor can we go
forward without ecology, continuing the liberal myth of infinitude. Inasmuch as ecological
notions are normative and the science of ecology is a constructed enterprise with no single
correct taxonomy or model, ecology itself falls within the scope of the as-if shared ontology of
land. What we can demand of societies making territorial claims is that they manifest some one
or other of the available ecologies of finitude, rather than that they all be subjected to the
32
See Ted Toadvine, “Biodiversity at 25: Revolution or Red Herring?” Ethics, Policy, and Environment.
27
Leopold-Callicott model or something else. We might then even accept that the Zoopolis model,
with its tripartite division and its reliance on a notion of species, is one available ontology of
land, one option for ethnogeographic communities, but that other communities can adopt the
Leopold-Callicott model, others endorse ecofeminism, or ecospace, or whatever. The key
challenge – what plenitude demands – is that there be an ecology of finitude, and that, having
articulated one or another such ecology, the society be demonstrably committed to it.
It might be objected, alternatively, that my attempt to theorize political rights to territory
for the more-than-human world includes nonhumans in the wrong way, for I have done either too
little or too much to integrate them. Take these in order. The first worry is that this is an ethic of
stewardship from above – that we are not ‘plain members and citizens of the biotic community’
but instead we would become benign, agapic gods on Earth instead of the wrathful and jealous
ones we are under liberalism. The test for this is, I think, in whether animals and plants can be
conceived as political agents contributing to or undermining resilience, rather than simply natural
automatons contributing to resilience by default, simply by performing their bare ethological
role. I think it’s clearly not inevitable that nonhuman animals and plants contribute to resilience.
Kudzu, cats, and rabbits are examples of creatures that, in certain contexts, reduce resilience.
When that happens, the current approach would not regard them as having a territorial right in
the place in which they find themselves. Insofar as they have other habitats in which they do
contribute to resilience, then those habitats would be the site of their territorial rights. If there is
no place where these creatures contribute, then we can work to enable them to fill an ecological
niche in a way that does contribute. Or we might need to fight them in self-defense.
But are we not, the objector rejoins, the only real political actors in the bunch? We take
turns ruling and being ruled, but nonhumans do not. It’s true that when it comes to writing laws
28
and voting on them, only humans can do the work. This is as true in Zoopolis as it is in
Aristotle’s Politics. But what makes nonhumans into political actors is that their contributions
are recognized as such, their territorial rights are made into a challenge that they can meet, and
their having met it limits our zone of freedom.
The flipside of the challenge is that we have gone too far to integrate animals, with the
consequence that we are now committed to eco-fascism. Should the territorial rights of animals
prevent our mining the rare earths that make smartphones possible? Should their territorial rights
be such that a human being who has entered grizzly bear territory may rightly be killed as a
political invader?
This challenge is a version of the familiar “eco-fascism” charge leveled at Leopold. My reply is
that liberalism stops short of doing everything it can to save everyone; that an alternative
approach also does so, but that the brunt falls on different people, cannot then count against the
alternative approach unless there is surplus misery, harming of named individuals as opposed to
statistical ones, unnecessary rationing, or some other familiar form of wrongful treatment. I don’t
see that the current account – by, for instance, refusing to kill grizzlies who maul unfortunate
hikers – would commit any of these wrongs. To the contrary, a significant part of the motivation
for the current approach is precisely to overcome the murder-suicide on a planetary scale that
liberalism is unable to avoid. One might reverse the charge of eco-fascism.
A related concern is that animals cannot be part of our ethnogeographic community
because they have no capacity for a shared ontology of land. I suspect that this is incorrect,
though I do not need to prove that; instead I need merely show that they can be ascribed an as-if
shared ontology of land. And this seems plainly true. As Donaldson and Kymlicka note regarded
domesticated animals, these creatures are capable of a complex ‘social ballet’, of knowing where
29
to relieve themselves and where to eat, where to sleep and where to play off leash, which dogs
rule which blocks, and whereabouts the vet’s office is. I have no doubt that a wide variety of
animals are capable of similar multispecies social ballets.
Conclusion
S28
I began by claiming that Zoopolis is a watershed in that it forces political philosophers to
theorize animals as political agents rather than as toys or simply part of the background
environment. Both because Donaldson and Kymlicka explicitly theorize wilderness animal
species as sovereign polities with territorial rights, and because theories of territory are supposed
to link human beings to particular places, the most immediate political impact of this Zoopolitan
shift should appear in theories of territory. Unfortunately, so far from having risen to the
challenge, theories of territory have tended to maintain and, in a confused attempt to reduce
ethnocentrism, even exacerbate their longstanding anthropocentrism.
Here I have tried to begin a conversation about remedying these problems by revising my
own theory of territory in light Zoopolis. I first challenged two essential aspects of Donaldson
and Kymlicka’s vision, namely, the tripartite division among kinds of animals in virtue of how
they want to relate to us, and the model of wilderness animal sovereignty. I then proposed a new
multispecies social ontology built on the Leopoldean Land Pyramid and my antecedent concept
of the ethnogeographic community. And I proposed a new conception of attachment to territory
based on the promotion of, or nonderogation from, resilience within. We gain territorial rights by
constructing and maintaining the spatial and temporal boundaries of a Land Pyramid and either
expanding it or at least not shrinking it, along both horizontal and vertical dimensions.
30